April 21st, 2015 at 11:02pm
The biggest problem that I noticed straight away with this story is your use of book saidism. This is the tendency for people to avoid using the word said at all costs. I can understand why you would fall into this trap though—said is a bit of a boring word, and on the flipside it can be quite difficult to strike the balance between avoiding book saidism and not overusing the word said.
The reason why this is an issue is mainly because the dialogue tags can sometimes be quite distracting from what the characters are actually saying. When you’re writing a story, it’s usually better to let what the characters are saying and their body language tell the story and let the readers imagine the tones for themselves. It’s really an issue of show, don’t tell.
That being said, your actual dialogue is quite well written. I’m not entirely sure how accurate it would be for the time period the story’s set in, however I found it was interesting, which is what you want.
Upon reading this the first time I found that the change in dates confused me but i'm sure it was my own mistake! If it suited you you could probably format it in bold, but I don't think it's that big of a deal.
Overall, I found that you did a very good job. Your writing is very detailed and your tenses rarely change (only saying rarely because I did find one mistake, mid page "bringing the conversation back to what really matter to her- the little girl's health.", matter should be mattered I really do love your plot and wonder what could have made Chandler so much like Caroline! Maybe they're related somehow.